For public leaders, there should be a balance between meeting formally and meeting more informally for lunch or a coffee. Photograph: Peter Titmuss/Alamy

An Ipsos Mori poll found that 86% of public leaders see partnerships with different organisations (such as other public services, charities or businesses) as a means of reducing costs.

The success of many of these partnerships will depend on the external alliances public leaders manage to develop. But if they wish to see their work supported and promoted within their own organisations, leaders must also set aside time for their internal alliances – both in terms of seeking out new ones and maintaining those they have already established.

As Kate Kennally, director of adult and social care and health at Barnet council in north-west London, says, it is "really important to spend time meeting and talking with colleagues who aren't working in your direct area". A first meeting should aim to identify what is on both party's priority list. "Then once you've built up the personal contact in the relationship, you can find out what areas are mutually beneficial to your work."

A balance should be struck between meeting in formal ways and meeting more informally for lunch or a coffee. But Kennally adds that "if you always meet people in a formal setting it almost starts off a new line management structure or hierarchy".

However, Tracy Vegro, director of energy, efficiency and consumers at the Department of Energy and Climate Change, makes the point that purely informal relationships can be just as unproductive, because people then tend to gravitate toward like-minded souls. "There's no point in me having lots of people like me agreeing with me," she says. "What I need is for the economists or the lawyers or the scientists to try and change my mind."

Seeking out these kinds of challenging but productive relationships is crucial to Vegro's work at the department. "You can't really do that classic civil service silo thing any more, because too many issues – particularly in the department I'm currently in – are so much broader than that," she says. "The ramifications that a policy might have over a 10 or 15-year period means you've got to have those broader internal alliances. The policy agenda dictates it."

Formal internal networks can help widen a leader's circle. Vegro says work she has done through the civil service's high potential development scheme, which aims to prepare people for challenging posts within Whitehall and help them address issues they collectively face as leaders, has helped her establish good cross-departmental working relationships.

"It can be quite a good sounding board for new ideas. You're able to look at what people have done in Defra or the Department of Health, how they've stimulated different ways of working," she says. She is also a member of her department's women's network, which has provided more useful connections.

Achieving the impossibleAccording to Andrew McCartney, director of programme support at Gloucestershire county council, strong internal alliances can help a leader meet what was initially thought to be an unachievable deadline because of people putting in extra effort and commitment, or provide them with the support they need to respond quickly to urgent issues.

As an example, he describes the time he was faced with "a highly political and national profile issue that gained local attention, and so required some detailed research and preparation in extremely tight deadlines". There were numerous legal, media and security-related issues that had to be overcome, and the task involved many people with busy schedules. But thanks to McCartney's internal alliances, "the end product was a good piece of quality work".

When alliances are established across different departments, both parties need to outline the work they're doing, and what they hope to achieve in future, in stark, simple terms. "You can't expect people to suddenly become experts about your service area and as passionate about it as you are," Kennally explains. "You need to be able to translate and make sense of it for them."

In her experience, the people who progress more quickly in their careers tend to be those who use these skills to establish and manage a wider network of contacts. She also reiterates how important it is to create time in your schedule for meeting colleagues. "Sometimes, when you're under pressure, you think 'Oh, I can scratch that meeting' or whatever else you've got arranged. But that's not very productive in the long term," she says.

Budget cuts and economic issues have undoubtedly heightened the need for strong internal alliances throughout council or government departments. Radical solutions are often needed to deal with the pressures of long-term fiscal constraint and rising need, which require strong internal relationships to see through. As Vegro says: "You always need to know that you can be honest with people, and you're only going to be able to do that if you have these kind of alliances."

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